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Ear to the Ground

NYT: Palin’s Politics Got Personal in Alaska

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Posted on Sep 13, 2008
gopconvention2008.com

Although critics are still accusing the “elite media” of unfairly scrutinizing Republican vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin, less than two months remain before the Nov. 4 election to suss out who she is and what she stands for. Saturday’s New York Times article on Palin’s governing style as mayor of Wasilla and governor of Alaska will no doubt draw more protests, but the Times’ findings are worth voters’ close consideration before they head to the polling booths.


The New York Times:

Ms. Palin walks the national stage as a small-town foe of “good old boy” politics and a champion of ethics reform. The charismatic 44-year-old governor draws enthusiastic audiences and high approval ratings. And as the Republican vice-presidential nominee, she points to her management experience while deriding her Democratic rivals, Senators Barack Obama and Joseph R. Biden Jr., as speechmakers who never have run anything.

But an examination of her swift rise and record as mayor of Wasilla and then governor finds that her visceral style and penchant for attacking critics—she sometimes calls local opponents “haters”—contrasts with her carefully crafted public image.

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Allan Krueger's avatar

By Allan Krueger, September 15, 2008 at 6:57 am Link to this comment

I know that 30-35% of the voters in the red states are buying the mccain - PALIN line. These people are religious nut cases, who think like PALIN. mccain is just going along with them, trying anything to get elected! Maverick / Change—bullshit! He is a senile flip flopping war monger!

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By Kashilinus, September 14, 2008 at 8:33 pm Link to this comment
(Unregistered commenter)

Interesting message to Alaskans from Sarah: “Sorry folks, but my new guy says no more earmarks!”

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By Inherit The Wind, September 14, 2008 at 7:07 pm Link to this comment

She’s a neo-con Christo-fascist.  Is anyone surprised that she’s therefore a vindictive crook who thinks the LAW is something to be gotten around when it’s convenient?

Is it a surprise that she uses democratic institutions’ rules to destroy those democratic institutions?

Is it a surprise that she’s an ignoramous because facts destroy her world view—and pushes to censor those facts?

No surprise.

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By Mudbones, September 14, 2008 at 5:35 pm Link to this comment

Is anyone surprised?

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By Margaret Currey, September 14, 2008 at 4:00 pm Link to this comment
(Unregistered commenter)

Of the things I read when Sarah was governor is hard to take,but when she was Mayor she did not work as hard as the mayor of New York she also used her husband when making policy decessions not with legislegators but here inner circle and she even took advice from her husband and he is not a government official.

Of course all this will be denied.

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Virginia777's avatar

By Virginia777, September 14, 2008 at 9:49 am Link to this comment

to: John Paul Telhomme

It is not lack of interest, it is lack of Knowledge. The press has aided the Bush Administration to a huge degree by covering up so much of the wrong they committed. Yes, Karl Rove (via Fox News) helped that along. Now, we are paying the price for that ignorance, but we can’t blame them, they were NOT told. The Media is to blame. We have to take back our media.

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By bob, September 14, 2008 at 9:42 am Link to this comment
(Unregistered commenter)

Ed Koch is a locked step liberal democrat, Why wouldn’t he support Obama and be against the McCain/Palin ticket?
RS-you dont want a republican white house, you want to have the same party running the executive branch that is running the do nothing legislative branch. Well at least it keeps politicians happily vacationing since they don’t have to worry about legislation or running the country

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By wildflower, September 14, 2008 at 9:23 am Link to this comment

Oh, dear . . . first it was King George W . . . now it’s Empress Sarah Faye:

“Throughout her political career, she has pursued vendettas, fired officials who crossed her and sometimes blurred the line between government and personal grievance, according to a review of public records and interviews with 60 Republican and Democratic legislators and local officials. . . .”

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By rage, September 14, 2008 at 9:09 am Link to this comment
(Unregistered commenter)

From what I’m hearing, the prophetess of false politics was not welcomed by her own in her own home state. Rove wasn’t able to spin a lot of that visit. Palin was stalked like prey by Alaskan women, mightily pissed by her outrageous misrepresentation of them in this race. Rove had his hands full just trying to keep them out of the camera shot. That, and folks like Big Ed Schultz trailed Palin to Alaska this weekend for the sole purpose of talking to real Alaskans about this governor, debunking a lot of the Rove spin.

Palin left a trail of bad blood in Wasilla. And, here lately, her husband Todd has been subpeonaed to chat about his wife’s abuse of power scandal. The woman is pretty much on record for being the beneficiary and primary abuser of her white privilege, a rabid reactionary religious ideologue, one of the worst governing executives in any state, a mindless pawn of big oil, and an unfaithful wife in a pretensious two-parent home facade plagued by nothing but godless strife. What’s worse, there is now a viral video of a young articulate African American male out claiming that Levi Johnson actually was not guilty of having his johnson out of his Levis to set off Bristol-gate, plaguing Gramps’ current run with another worrisome black baby drama. I see the end of this run from here. Palin’s boobs are not Anna-Nicole huge enough to take and keep the most peurile pinhead’s mind off the real state of the union long enough to vote with his dick for this much politically irrelevant drama coupled to such an apocalyptic deluge of unmeasurable ignorance and utter incompetence at the executive level.

It’s one thing for Palin to be the antithesis of Hillary Rodham Clinton. It’s another for the McCain-Palin Campaign to stand for nothing short of totally insulting the Nation’s intelligence with nothing but the coy cynical temerity of sheer disdain, loathe, and scorn for half the human population crassly aforethought. Women are offended by this outrageous desparagement of the advances and ascents women have courageously achieved at the cost of struggle, peril, and suffering. So, are the men who tirelessly supported efforts to grant women deserved equality in our society and culture. Not just liberals and progressives, either. Furthermore, there are a whole lot more tired voters in 2008 than in 2004 who can’t see where four more years of the abysmal hardship we endure now are going to be any different with Gramps and some candy heiress fecklessly going along with a program of wedge issues and personal beliefs these idiots have misidentified as pertinent issues that matter to the majority of us. We are concerned about more than abortion, gay marriage, and the Christianization of America.

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By purplewolf, September 14, 2008 at 8:55 am Link to this comment

This woman is even more vile, evil and underhanded than Cheney the Chainsaw and Stumble Weed Shrub. Hiring her “cronies” she went to school with at much higher incomes than they had on their other jobs-just like Shrub, secrecy that Cheney would envy, abuse of power not unlike the last 7 3/4 years of Republican rule, a hate list of those who do not see things “HER” way and personal vendettas upon those she doesn’t like. Can’t you just see her using the Patriotic Act to destroy anyone who does not bow down to Lord Sarah and do as she says, after all, it is GODS plan for her to control every ones lives in America, then the world. She uses GOD as a crutch for those who think that anyone who can say the word God could never lie(I have met people like this). Does believe in bigger government, regardless of what comes out of her mouth-the fact that she has stated she will work to over turn a woman’s right to choose speaks of total government intrusion onto your personal reproductive rights. That is too up close and personal for me. It is my body and since I am the one who has to live in it, no one else has the right to dictate to me as to how to live in it, how to take care of it and what to do with it. It is not her right to take control of my personal life and the lives of others and order us into her narrow view of her world. She is just another bully, and we all have seen where that has gotten America in the eyes of the world today.

This is a petty vindictive bitch. No other way to put it. I have worked with women like her and went to school with girls like her, and unfortunately they can bluff those of lesser intelligence into thinking that they are just wonderful and don’t understand why some people don’t see her through the smoke filled haze of their blacked-out (formally rose colored) glasses. That is because not everyone out there is taken in by lies and embellished political hype. There are still some of us who knows crap when they see it and this woman is 100% pure talking moose crap.

And she is a sadistic uncaring thing as to her treatment of wolves and polar bears. If you can, check out the video of aerial wolf hunting that Defenders Of Wildlife has made, which shows about Sarah Palin’s wolf killing and bounty, she found an old law on the books and revived it to allow for such inhumane treatment of creatures that are at the mercy of inhumane people like Sarah Palin. Wonder if she will treat the people who do not vote Repug this way too, if her side manages to steal another election, and do not be surprised if they do, as they are using the same defective voting machines in many of the same states that they knew didn’t work correctly the last time around for Bush. Guess those FEMA camps will start filling up pretty soon, especially the biggest one Bush had constructed in Alaska.

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thebeerdoctor's avatar

By thebeerdoctor, September 14, 2008 at 8:10 am Link to this comment

Perhaps this is news you can use:
http://mudflats.wordpress.com/2008/09/14/alaska-women-reject-palin-rally-is-huge/

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By hippy pam, September 14, 2008 at 7:18 am Link to this comment

Please ALL…GO TO THIS SITE…...
http://morosehellhole.blogspot.com/2008/09/sarah-palin-has-criminal-record.html

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By Fahrenheit 451, September 14, 2008 at 6:50 am Link to this comment

Given this has long been the democrats race to lose; they’ve just been handed a gift by the NYT; and I fervently hope they don’t blow it!

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By Fahrenheit 451, September 14, 2008 at 6:29 am Link to this comment

It would appear the NYT expose’ of Palin’s corrupt governance in Alaska is gaining traction.  Bye, bye Sarah.

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By Marianne, September 14, 2008 at 2:05 am Link to this comment
(Unregistered commenter)

There is ample proof already out there,that this McCain=Palin ticket isn`t going nowhere ...it`s a big joke and an insult to ones own intelligence.
The website below should make everybody aware….

http://www.buzzflash.com/articles/contributors/1755

....that the ultimate decision,however,has the be the
overwhelming rejection by the voting citizen/public.
Just say NO to McCain=Palin..Say YES to Obama=Biden!

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By Fahrenheit 451, September 14, 2008 at 12:31 am Link to this comment

There has been one striking difference (among others) between McCain’s and Obama’s campaign; McCain is campaigning as though we’re stupid/idiots and Obama campaigns as though we have a functional brain.  Are the majority of Americans stupid?  If so then Obama has been mistaken.

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By John Paul Telhomme, September 13, 2008 at 8:50 pm Link to this comment
(Unregistered commenter)

Reading this makes Mayor Koch’s observations in the NYT even more poignant.  A head of government who draws up an enemy’s list, or something that looks like it, and acts against those on the list should merit a bit more extensive vetting than she has received.  Yet, we are barely five weeks away from the general elections.  A cold chill should be running down the spine of every voting-age American.  But are they listening?  Do voters, ordinary Americans, know what has happened in the last eight years regarding the constriction on their constitutional rights? Do they know about how many Americans hive died in Iraq?  Do they know why Americans soldiers are fighting and dying in Afghanistan?  Why has the current administration not released even to this date any comprehensive energy policy?  With this kind of lack of interest and lack of education on the subject (which Obama was smart to tap into) a majority of adult Americans once again are thinking of candidates for the Presidency and Vice Presidency as contenders for the American Idol.  No wonder we have such hoopla about pigs and lipstick and about Sarah Palin and why the McCain campaign conflate the effects of celebrity on the people with true political rallying.

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By RS, September 13, 2008 at 8:15 pm Link to this comment
(Unregistered commenter)

re: “Either the polls are wrong or we’re in deep, deep, shit.”

Right now the polls have Obama winning a very close election. Be concerned, but by no means panic.

Palin energized the Right Base to support McSame.  People on the Left should use this time to look to see how they can do more than they’ve been doing to help elect Obamaa.

This election could go either way, but there’s plenty of reason to be optimistic, and there’s plenty or reason to roll up our sleeves just a bit more, donate, volunteer time, etc, to make sure we do not have 4 more years or a Republican controlled White House!

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Allan Krueger's avatar

By Allan Krueger, September 13, 2008 at 7:47 pm Link to this comment

If you liked BUSH, you will love PALIN!

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By Fahrenheit 451, September 13, 2008 at 7:16 pm Link to this comment

Boy, they’ll make a fine pair; what with McCain’s evil, senile twin and Sarah Barracuda.  Either the polls are wrong or we’re in deep, deep, shit.

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